The Days Grimm Podcast
The Days Grimm, "arguably Indiana's most comical, thrilling, and controversial podcast", This three-pronged mandate acts as a primary filter for their guest selection. The "comical" aspect is reflected in its official genre of "COMEDY INTERVIEWS" and its history of hosting local stand-up comedians. The "thrilling" component is evident in interviews with individuals who have extraordinary life stories, such as people who survived shootings, rare medical conditions, and combat. Finally, the "controversial" element is demonstrated by Brian & Thomas’ willingness to engage in difficult or unfiltered conversations, touching on topics like homelessness, artificial intelligence, and religious hypotheticals.
A crucial element of the show's tone is its tagline, "Brought to you by Sadness & ADHD (non-medicated)". This self-aware and raw positioning signals a modern comedic sensibility that embraces vulnerability and finds humor in personal struggle. The podcast's brand is not built on polished narratives but on the authentic, often messy, intersection of hardship and humor. The most compelling guests are those who have navigated a "Grimm" reality and emerged with a story to tell, and ideally, a sense of humor about it. This dynamic is the core of the show's appeal and the primary filter for identifying a story worth telling.
The Days Grimm Podcast
TDG EP244 From Firefighter to Arcade Baron: The Crazy Story of High Score Saloon with Clint Hoskins
In this episode of The Days Grimm, Brian and Tom sit down with Clint Hoskins, co-owner of High Score Saloon and Player 2 in Evansville, Indiana. Clint shares the incredible journey of how a $200 Mortal Kombat 4 arcade cabinet kickstarted a business partnership with Jared Nebel that would eventually take over the local nightlife scene.
We dive deep into Clint’s background as a forward observer in the military and his 12-year career with the Evansville Fire Department. Clint reveals the brutal reality of opening a small business, including a nightmare lawsuit from a condo association that cost them $20,000 before they even opened their doors. Plus, we discuss the massive community impact High Score has made, from paying off over $50,000 in student lunch debt to donating thousands to the Tri-State Food Bank.
In this episode, we cover:
- The Origin Story: How Clint met his business partner Jared in Panama City Beach and bonded over vintage video games.
- The Hustle: Buying and selling vintage toys and arcade cabinets to fund the dream.
- Firefighter Life: The intense training involved in the CPAT and the reality of compassion fatigue.
- The Lawsuit: How High Score Saloon was sued for being a "bar" in a condo basement and how they fought back.
- Expansion: The creation of Player 2 for kids and the future of their new venue on Main Street.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 - Intro & Welcome Clint Hoskins
4:25 - The $200 Mortal Kombat Machine that Started It All
9:22 - Growing Up Poor & Gaming on a Budget
16:20 - Joining the Army & Forward Observer Training
21:45 - Firefighter Training: The CPAT Test
29:00 - The Reality of Fighting Fires & Trauma
35:17 - Finding Barn Find Arcade Games
46:37 - The Lawsuit That Almost Killed High Score Saloon
55:27 - Opening Player 2 During COVID
1:02:28 - The Struggles of Running a Business in Evansville
1:13:30 - Paying Off $54,000 in Student Lunch Debt
1:26:00 - Future Plans & Appreciation for Employees
#HighScoreSaloon #Evansville #SmallBusiness #ArcadeBar #Firefighter #Entrepreneurship #TheDaysGrimm #RetroGaming #Pinball
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[The Days Grimm is brought to you by]
Sadness & ADHD (non-medicated)
Hell yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Turn up a little bit. Hello! Hello, hello, hello everyone, and welcome to another thrilling episode of The Days Grimm. My name is Brian Michael Day.
SPEAKER_00:My name is Thomas Grimm, and who's producing the show today, Brian?
SPEAKER_01:Graham Gallagher. None other than uh Yeah. He's a comedian and he's really funny. So find him and see his stuff. Um check him out on the IG. Uh short of that, uh, Tom, will you do me a favor and help welcome into the studio today kneecap drum roll Clint Hoskins. Did I get it? Yeah, right. Okay, sick, dude. Of High Score Saloon. Of High Score Saloon. How are you, sir? Doing well. How are you guys? Uh dude, doing pretty good. I've had a pretty solid like few months.
SPEAKER_00:So I'm like riding a high there. Dude, I'm just pumped to get you in. I think I I messaged you guys a while ago, and I was just sitting there waiting and waiting, and then I saw it pop up, and I was like, yes, finally.
SPEAKER_01:It's been at least a year, I think.
SPEAKER_02:It was like four months, so I never check the messages because we get hundreds of those. Like, grow your followers. Do you want to do it? And it's always spam. And then I saw uh Matt Fitzpatrick. I'm good friends with the blue stocking social people. I'm a big reader. I've known Matt since they opened up. And I saw his thing and I clicked on it, and I saw that I actually had a waiting message from you guys. And I was like, what? And then I clicked it. So actually, it because of knowing him is how I saw the message.
SPEAKER_01:We're honored to have you here. Yeah, seriously. Thank you so much. You could have done anything else on a Sunday evening, and you came in and uh decided to spend an hour with us. And I'm super pumped to find out about you. Uh, your other the other owner's name is uh you said it, I already forgot. Jared Nebel. Jared what? Jared Nebel. I'm excited to hear about both of you guys and like how this whole crazy thing came to fruition and then how you've grown it. You outgrew a place, moved to another place, you know, and you're we've got another thing that we might talk about today, um, if you're willing to. But yeah, there's just tons of stuff that we can talk about today. I'm very, very excited.
SPEAKER_00:I guess you want to give our uh listeners a brief elevator pitch of who you are and then what is high score saloon?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so high score saloon started um as far as you know officially in 2017. We're about to hit our eight-year anniversary. Um, we opened up in a little basement location in downtown Evansville, Indiana, and it was something that came to fruition after about a half a decade of us working on other arcade and video game related endeavors. Um, but we just moved from 323 Main Street over to 309 Main Street. We went from 1,800 square feet to about 20,000, which 12 of that is totally unused, and then you know, the bottom floor which we actually utilize is about 4,500. Um, but yeah, uh kind of you know, it's one of those things it used to be original to have an arcade bar and now they're everywhere. Yeah, that's true.
SPEAKER_00:Like we whenever we started, I was gonna say I hadn't heard of another arcade barcade before you got arcademy.
SPEAKER_01:Is that how is that the property? I think I I call it Arcademy, but it might be arcademy. I've talked to that guy. I want to have I've talked to the owner like behind the bar. Carl, he's an interesting guy, Carl. He's done a lot. He's into like that. I don't even know what you call that style that his bar is. It's like um, I don't even know what steampunk. Yeah, big steampunk head. I'd love to get him in here. Um, but yeah, no, it did used to be unique, and then Stranger Things came out, and everybody's like, I need a VHS player. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02:I got my first arcade game by chance, and that's how it all started. It was a guy called me, so I I was in the fire department, um, and on my off day, everyone has an off day job. I bought and sold vintage video games, action figures on eBay. So I've sold like Thundercats, G.I. Joe's, and I did it fairly large scale. I did like 15 to 20 grand a year just out of my girlfriend's spare room.
SPEAKER_01:You're filing taxes, kinda kind of. Yeah, oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Any anything over 20 grand on eBay, you always have to file. But um, I'd done it for a couple years, and a guy had messaged me and he said, Hey, do you buy arcade games? And I was like, I haven't, but sure, I'll come look at it.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And another bychance happening years and years ago when I was 18 years old. I was in Panama City Beach.
SPEAKER_01:Hell yeah, PCB.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, back whenever it was still a thing. Hell yeah. And we were driving down the road and we saw a dude with red hair walking no shirt, bare feet down the road. And we were like, what the hell? Like he's pale. Yeah. And we stopped, we're like, Do you need a ride? He's like, Yeah. He's hammered. He gets in the Jeep, my buddy Goose's Jeep. And um, we're like, Oh, where are you from? He goes, Evansville, Indiana. And we're like, get the fuck out of here.
SPEAKER_00:Can I get a ride?
SPEAKER_02:And and it was Jared Nebel, my business partner.
SPEAKER_01:Get the fuck out of here.
SPEAKER_02:We uh we met whenever we were about 18, 19 years old in Panama City Beach. And after that, like we would drink in college and meet each other, yada yada. But we we were back in the day, you added every person that you met, you added on Facebook almost immediately because that was the only social media. So, like, within you know, we we took him back to the chateau and we drank some more and we added each other on Facebook and we were buds. Oh, yeah, um, all of us, and uh we kept in contact, like we joked around and stuff like that on post, but I knew that he dicked around with arcade and pinball machines. Well, I I go and um I talked to this guy about a Mortal Kombat 4 machine, and I called Jared and I was like, hey man, I I haven't talked to you in a while. It's Clint. Um, do you know about these? He's like, Yeah, I got like seven of them. He said they're all in parts and pieces. He just moved back from um Louisville, Kentucky. Okay, and uh so he was like, Yeah, I'll come check it out with you. And we go there, the monitor is dead, and I was like, Oh man, it doesn't work. Have you ever like sorry to interrupt? No, you're fine.
SPEAKER_00:Like, had you ever built a computer or anything at that time?
SPEAKER_02:I can't do anything. Gotcha.
SPEAKER_00:I didn't know because like I know when you open those up, it's like an old, old school computer basically decides.
SPEAKER_02:The ones from like 2000, so even a Mortal Kombat 4 was like a hard drive, a PCB, a monitor, and a power supply. They're really rudimentary. I mean, the PCBs aren't obviously that's you you're getting into like ROM burning and all kinds of other shit. But as far as far as that working, it's power supply to a monitor. That's it. So I go and I look at it and I'm like, oh, it's broke. And Jared kind of elbows me. He's like, it's fine, get it. And I was like, okay, and it's in a basement, so we have to load it up. My buddy Greg Wilkins, who was one of my first employees, also was there with me because he liked Mortal Kombat. He's like, I just want to go see the thing. Yeah, I'm gonna see this fucking. He had it. So this is how early we were on. We were on this. Greg had a dolly, so Greg got recruited to, yeah. Greg got recruited to come with us to get a dolly and help us drag it up a flight of stairs.
SPEAKER_01:What'd you pay for it?
SPEAKER_02:200. That's so you you see that shit online though. Those are that is rich people prices. That is a dude who makes$300,000 a year and wants an arcade in his room. I can still find that game. I sell that game for$1,200 whenever I get it. No kidding. And that's afterwards.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But this one was so this is back in 2013. And they've gone up in value because now people are opening up arcade and arcade bars.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, it's a commodity that's needed.
SPEAKER_02:So we brought it home, and Jared he gets in there and he's like, Oh, your flyback's fucked, which is like the suction cup that hooks up to an old CRT. He replaces it, boots right up, works perfect. And I bought him a case of beer, we had a couple beers and played it. A can of duster and a suction cup. And and this is whenever Jared really he didn't know what he was doing. He shocked himself more than he fixed anything. But he he had enough knowledge to be dangerous. Right. So I was kind of like, all right, that's it. I had just broken up with my girlfriend, um, and I moved back into my house. So I was like, Well, I got a Mortal Kombat 4 in my living room. This is awesome. Right. And I didn't really think much of it. And me and Jared always got along, but he is very Tommy boy to my um David Spade. I'm very dry. I don't, you know, I I run about like a four to a seven, and Jared is always a one or a ten, and he's very high energy. So like he was like, Oh, I come over and check out my you know, my collection. And I was just at a point in my life, kind of like I am now, where I'm just I'm kind of dulled down. And I was like, You're in a valley, not a flat out. Um he was just very big energy.
SPEAKER_01:Dude, Jared sounds like a blast. Also, we maybe we should get him tested for bipolar.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, no, Jared is fully ADHD, hyperactive. That sounds like a bipolar. He he has gotten really good at harnessing his power though, because he's one of those guys who if you get him to focus, he can do anything. I lock him in. We fight constantly because I am a very make a schedule, make a list person, and Jared is very much a like throw it in the air and shoot at it. But he hits everything though. Oh, yeah, brother.
SPEAKER_01:It sounds like you got a winner.
SPEAKER_02:He's extremely effective at what he does. You just have to keep him on some kind of course, or I'll tell other stories.
SPEAKER_00:Or he's making his own game out of all the other spare. Literally.
SPEAKER_01:He will I do want to I want to pump the brake. I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on the story. Yeah, I want to know where do they make Clint Hoskins at? Where where do you hail from? Where are you from?
SPEAKER_02:Evansville, Indiana. So well, I was technically born here, then we lived in Wadesville. There wasn't a um facility for birthing out there.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, nice.
SPEAKER_02:Um, but we lived there for a few years. House burned down. We moved here whenever I still don't really remember it. I was about three years old. Um, had three older brothers. My dad was a construction worker, my mom was a homemaker, and we were at the same house until I was 15. Then we moved a mile away, but graduated from Wrights High School. How old were you when you got your first video game? Uh I mean, well, so my brother's oldest brother is born in 1975, so I was born with them. The first game, I was just telling the story, the first game I ever remember playing was Mario 3 for the Nintendo, the yellow one. Yeah, and I've we were always gamers though. We didn't have any money, we were dirt poor. Um, it was my dad raising a family of six on a construction worker's salary, so we didn't have a lot, which that was at least feasible 25 years ago, and now you can barely raise yourself being a laborer, but it was at least feasible.
SPEAKER_01:Do you think side question? Do you think Mario 3 may or may not be the most slept-on Mario of all time? I think it's it should be the most popular. I think it's the best one ever. Yeah, the Black Pants Mario is like literally, yeah, and this is the one where yeah, you can get the raccoon tail.
SPEAKER_02:You can get fire, frog, raccoon, you can do the thing um where you turn it. Yeah, the raccoon is where you turn into the actual uh like statute where you can't be hurt. Um, they added a lot to this game, and they did like the warp, so this is a big speed run game, too.
SPEAKER_01:Hell yeah, dude. I think three is slept on I don't think I ever played three. Oh, it's the best Mario, I think. Still, and you go through the levels, through the map. Yeah, dude, that's crazy. Thank you for pulling that up for a good visual representation. I needed that. Um, but sorry, I did not mean to cut you off. So Dirt Floor Poor, you got five, five siblings? Four. Me and three others. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So the nice part about video games is like one, they were cheaper back then than what they are now, but like you could buy it and then the whole family, like that entertained four kids. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, and it cost a one-time thing and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_02:You just didn't have the options now. You know, you might play a first-person shooter or an RPG or this or that, but like whenever Zelda came out, that was before my time, even I think it was 1985 or 86, whenever the first one came out. Okay, that was a whole new thing because all you really had was games like Atari, where it's like you move a thing, you maybe shoot at a thing, and you try to get to the end.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, you had gathered popular, Pac-Man.
SPEAKER_02:But you got the games where you're actually like on an adventure, like Mario, where you're going from castle to castle. Right, then Pokemon came in and changed it. Yeah, that that was actually the game that probably made me a gamer. Pokemon. My parents had divorced, and I think my mom felt bad, and we talked her into buying us each uh Colt got a Game Boy Pocket, I got a Game Boy color, and he got red and blue. And I bet I still play through Pokemon Blue once every year, probably. Oh, yeah. But we played that game. So it was my mom after the fact, she was like, I spent$200 each on you guys for Christmas in 1997. That's insane. But she was like, You guys spent hundreds of hours on those Game Boys. She it was the best investment she ever made to keep us.
SPEAKER_00:And the nice part about red and blue is they didn't have a battery like Crystal, uh, where it would die and you have to replace it.
SPEAKER_02:They actually, but the original batteries they use last like 24 years, and the ones they put in crystal gold silver are like so it's a CR 2032 versus a CR like 1688. Um, the ones for the Game Boy Advanced games just suck. But those actually have batteries in them.
SPEAKER_00:U Pokemon I have not lost a save on these yet, but I have on my crystal, my silver, and my gold.
SPEAKER_02:Unfortunately, you will, yeah. They so even as early as the original Zelda for NES, that has a battery in it. Wow. A lot we opened that shit up, and that's so that's how I started high score was selling video games. I had to learn how to solder just to replace batteries and stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, for the during COVID, I took my Game Boy Color and I put an L C D screen in it and got into like modding them.
SPEAKER_01:I'm got some remote on the for the lay, i.e. myself, because I wasn't like a big Game Boy head. Like I didn't, I was always like a console kid. But what's this battery you're talking about?
SPEAKER_02:So CR2032, so it's to save your progress. Um, you can play the game without it, but if you hit save to maintain your file, it won't work.
SPEAKER_00:Um Imagine like playing through a game instead of saving, you turn it off and then you have to restart.
SPEAKER_01:Is this what you're pulling up?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so that's like okay, okay, okay. That's a game called Shadowgate. That's a click and point adventure game from they they were really big on DOS computers back in the day, and they came to NES port. Um, there's a whole series of those deja vu, Shadowgate, and a couple others from that series.
SPEAKER_01:But yeah, you are insanely, I don't know why this is shocking me. You're very knowledgeable of video games. It always about video games.
SPEAKER_02:Why is that? Jared can fix anything. Jared can repair these. He can drop, he knows nothing about video game lore. He's not like a zero point zero. I know the I know the value of every game within like 10% off the top of my head.
SPEAKER_01:Are you a contemporary gamer as well? Like like Xbox 360, X set and you're not into the new game.
SPEAKER_02:I have not the newest console I've ever used is a Switch, which that is just for the pick up and put down ability. I have it's not for the new games, it's to play it's like the modern Game Boy, really. Yeah, I just want something that I can pick up, fuck around with. But as far as like I played Xbox in high school, Halo, everybody did, but I never owned one. I would go to my buddies and I kept like my I'd play Final Fantasy on my PlayStation one, like Final Fantasy VII. I never messed around with any of that. Oh yeah, dude.
SPEAKER_01:All right, so so after high so in high school, before we get past high school, what were what were some of your like um hobbies short of video games? Did you all job stuff? I didn't I played video games.
SPEAKER_02:Wasn't allowed to play any sports because I had three older brothers and two of them were really good.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And they quit in high school. So my mom, to me and my other brother Colt, pretty much told us no sports. I'm not starting it because you won't finish it. But I I boxed all through high school. That was the only sport that I did how did you do that?
SPEAKER_01:Just like out of recreational.
SPEAKER_02:CK knew some downtown. CK knew there used to be a uh guy named Dick used to run the boxing program down there.
SPEAKER_01:I love a dick. My favorite dick is uh Dick Winners from Band of Brothers. Shout out. I think he passed away. Um that's crazy though. Uh so that was your that was one of your main things was boxing. You never got into anything else, like ground grappling or anything like that.
SPEAKER_02:No, I did it, I did MMA for seven years after I left for the army, came back, and I started with a guy named Scott Hensey, who was like, that's the MMA guy here. Let's get there. And I fought for big bully for years and years. So, what made you enlist in the army? Uh didn't have any money, and I wasn't gonna have anywhere to live. Oh yeah, brother, me too. I like that. They were gonna give me$20,000 and a place to sleep while I figured it out, and that was it. I I have I have no allegiance to it whatsoever. It was one of those things where it was like I I remember a roach crawled over my face at the place I was staying at, and I was like, I'm fucking out of here. And I yeah, I went and I signed up with Sergeant Stevens on the west side the next day to be whatever job they would give me with the highest bonus. I was a Ford observer.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah, love a fister. He's our second fister. Yeah. Who was the other fister? Was it Corey? Yeah, Corey was a fister. Sure. Uh Corey Mock. He was uh He's a bit older than you. That sounds familiar. He was Indiana State Police for years, did some weapon sales for he was a sales rep for SIG Sauer for years, and he just recently transferred into the construction no HVAC HVAC, I think. Now he's doing like HVAC sales. Um really, really good dude though. Crazy. But yeah, the uh forward observer, man. That's a cool so walk me through a little bit like for maybe the folks at home that didn't see Corey's episode or they don't know what a forward observer is. What what was your key responsibility as a forward observer?
SPEAKER_02:Call for fire. So you training is essentially sit up on a hill, you have a pair of binos, you estimate the distance and direction. So it might be um you get like three subsequent corrections. It's been years since I've done this, but essentially you see a tank out there, you call distance 1200, direction, you know, 32, and they'll drop around and it'll be a little bit to the left and a little bit low, and you'll say add 200, right, 3-0, and you're just you're making corrections to try to land a howitzer round on the target. Walk it in, if you will. I hear a lot of guys say walk like battlefield. Kind of, yeah. I mean, you're you're essentially it's you're not um dropping from a plane or anything, you're actually using like 13 Bravo men on howitzer guns. Like a mortar, essentially. So you're adjusting an old mortar system, yeah. Um and I actually did the other side of that job, 13 Delta, which is like the charts and darts portion of it. I reclassed into that so I understood the guys like shooting the cannons? No, the guys who are like actually sending back the uh refraction directions. So like I send one thing and it has to be because I'm looking at it from here, and then it goes to another guy who is in another point, and he sends that back to the 13 Bravo so they can redirect everything. So there's actually three people in it.
SPEAKER_00:That's crazy.
SPEAKER_02:I always thought it was just two, like a lot of these guys get CTE just from shooting the mortar off. Right. I never dicked with the Bravo guys because they're so it goes infantry and then the 13, or so it's 11 Bravos, then 13 Bravos, and then 13 Fox. You were 11 Bravo. I was 11 Bravo.
SPEAKER_01:I was real close because when you go to basic training and you know you're going you sign up as an 11 uh quote 11 Bravo, they sign you up as an 11 X and the X is because uh No, 11 Charlie is the that's right, 11 Charlie is the mortar man.
SPEAKER_02:But when you're in basic training, they take the Charlies and the Bravos take the exact same basic training, so you don't know if you're gonna be a Bravo infantryman or a Charlie mortar man infantryman kind of and I just did mine because I wanted to stay, so I ended up being active duty for like a year and a half, two years. Um, and then I got I was National Guard, so I came back here after that. Oh, hell yeah, dude.
SPEAKER_01:So you went National Guard, not active.
SPEAKER_02:So I did two years active, then four years afterwards. Oh, it was two years active as an active action. This is back like 2007, where they were like, we'll give you whatever you want and 20 grand. We just want we had low numbers.
SPEAKER_01:We need bodies, like right.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, we need people as bad as so I got college first and all kinds of shit, but I I muffed up. I got like an eighty seven on the ASVAB. And whenever I came back, they were like, Why did you not do still better than Brian? A smart person. No, eighty seven's good. Yeah, I got a thirty five. That they were like, You can do any job you want. And the passing score is a thirty five. I I hadn't No idea. Um, I just knew I wanted the highest bonus I could get, and I didn't want to have to leave Evansville because I wanted to be the firefighter here or a teacher. What so what did you choose for college? Um, so I got back and I went to USI and they just about, well, USI just about didn't take me because they were like, your ACT scores were fantastic, but you were a D plus student, which means you're fairly intelligent, but you're really lazy and you'll probably flunk out. And I was like, I won't do that. And I flunked out after one semester. Oh yeah, brother. So they sent me to Ivy Tech, where I actually did hunker down there a little bit more, and I did about a year and a half. I reapplied back out to USI, and I went there until 2011, whenever the Evansville Fire Department sent me a letter and said, Hey, you got a job. You're and at the time, Evansville Fire Department, you'd get a thousand applicants, and they maybe took 12. So it's what you wanted to do, yeah. I wanted to be a teacher second, but the fire department was that was a job you just didn't get. They took 1% of people. Um, they only have a staff of about 300, and they were getting a thousand applicants every two years, and of those thousands, they would take eight to fifteen. Oh, yeah, dude.
SPEAKER_01:And I was fire department pays better than each other. Oh, yeah. At the time, I think considerably.
SPEAKER_02:And the fire department started at like 48.
SPEAKER_01:You know who is a teacher?
SPEAKER_02:Our mutual friend Adele. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. I was gonna say Matthew fits better. Yeah, Matt, he's a teacher out at Castle, too, I believe. Yeah, Matthew's a he's got some tenure though, and he's been there for a while.
SPEAKER_01:Uh yeah, he's been there at dog's age by now.
SPEAKER_00:So uh training for the fire department. That's kind of wild, isn't it? Don't they like set connexes on fire and you gotta like go in? Burn rooms do they call them, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And it the worst thing for the fire department, I still help people get ready for it as far as whenever they have questions, like, oh, what do I have to get ready for? You do something called a CPAT, and it starts off with you putting on a 50-pound vest and then 25 pounds of shoulder weights, and you have to walk up 18 flights of stairs, um, which is it's a stairmaster 180 steps, which you hear that and you're like, I could do that. Three minutes, but three minutes with 75 pounds on your back is a lot. The people who really struggle with it though, it isn't overweight people, big people, it's dudes that are in crazy good shape, but they're 140 pounds because putting on 75 pounds, you're adding 50% of your body weight. You're you're not used to that amount. I was 195, 200 whenever I came on. Yeah, and I was still fighting at the time.
SPEAKER_01:So I was six foot, like right. Right over six foot. So you walk around now. What are you at right now? Low now, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and fighting stamina. I was in great shape and I I walked through it. But if you're a little guy and you put on 75, that's a lot of weight. But I saw dudes that were 285 pounds and soft and did not work out, they could still get the cardio was hard after three minutes, but that's the worst part. You essentially to get the job to be in stated and to qualify for the job, you do three minutes on a stairmaster at one step per second with 75 pounds on.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_02:Um, it's called the C PAT. Um you have to do that. You do a hose drag, a dummy drag, you take a sledgehammer and you hit a thing until it dings with a certain amount of PSI. Um, you do a breach and pull with a pike pole, so you lift up weights, then you pull down weights. I think three sets of three five, three, five, three, five. You have to carry two saws and wrap it around a thing. Uh, actually, years later, after I'd gotten on, my brother Colt was going through a stretch where he worked for the library, didn't like his job. He he was just kind of at a spot where he was like, I don't know what to do. And I was like, Well, let's start going to the gym together. Let's just get you started. Let's work. Well, I just wanted him to work out so we could I could keep an eye on him, we could spend time together.
SPEAKER_01:Keep him positive. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And uh he went from probably 220 pounds and couldn't bench press 115 to 195 and was repping out like 185, which isn't a crazy amount of weight, but for he never touched a weight.
SPEAKER_01:How many days did it take him to get? Or how many, how long was that turnaround? Like three months. Uh that's a that's a 180-degree turnaround for him.
SPEAKER_02:And that's insane. He got in good shape, and I was like, apply for the fire department. Yeah, he was like, I he's like, I won't be a good firefighter. And I was like, no one's a good firefighter. This is Colt? Colt, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:The brother that's the one that's younger than you.
SPEAKER_02:Uh, I'm the youngest. He's two and a half older than me. Oh, damn. But I was like, just apply. It's like no one's good at being a firefighter. No one's ever been good at running into buildings. It's just being intelligent enough to situational awareness, things like that, and having a you know, good head on your shoulders as far as the job is 98.9% getting along with the guys in the house, not being abrasive, not being an asshole, not picking fights, not splitting hairs over politics, and just doing the job whenever it comes about.
SPEAKER_01:What am I responsible for? Yeah. How do I achieve this?
SPEAKER_02:And it honestly, most of the runs that you make are EMT related. Um, because we're we run an EMT for the city as well.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah. Did you wind up doing that? Did you wind up getting EMT certified as well? I have to.
SPEAKER_02:You have to get Oh, you have to be on Evansville Fire Department, you have to be EMT. That's insane.
SPEAKER_01:I don't think it's the same everywhere else because one of my buddies is on in St. Louis, Collinsville, Illinois, and I don't think he had to, but he just got his EMT certified.
SPEAKER_02:So, how long were you a firefighter? 12 years. I did 10 years in Gymtown, um, station 10 on Heidelbach, Columbia.
SPEAKER_01:Hell yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And then I knew I was burnt out, and I tried to save my career by going to a slower station. So station 10 made about 1,700 runs a year. So um, and those are everywhere from fire to alarm to wrecks to actual, you know, EMT stuff. And I moved to Sevens, which only does like 300 runs a year. But I was just I was too far burnt out.
SPEAKER_01:It was one of those things where I just kind of the frequent flying in Gymtown is probably due to all the all the cooking incidences that they have.
SPEAKER_02:You know what I'm saying? Gymtown, most of what we make is frequent flyers, but it is people who are extremely poor and homeless and they just want somewhere warm to stay.
SPEAKER_01:I swear.
SPEAKER_02:So they'll call you day after day.
SPEAKER_01:We've had a couple of warehouse fires.
SPEAKER_00:A lot of them, well, that and like a lot of your like mental health places, they fill up real fast in the winter. Crime goes up in the winter because people are cold. So they would rather sit in jail and be warm for a few days than out on the streets.
SPEAKER_02:Or they just want to go sit in the hospital and get food for a little bit. And I mean, you feel you feel bad for it. I I never, you know, I've got up at 2, 3 in the morning hundreds of times for the same people that week after week called. There's nothing wrong with them. They just don't want to be sitting on the corner of Columbia and Heidelbach freezing their ass off. And they'd rather go to the emergency room. So we go, all right, yeah, I don't care what you're faking. I mean, yeah, it doesn't, it's no hair off my ass. I'm there to, I'm gonna check your blood pressure, heart rate. Get you in there, chief. Get you in and out.
SPEAKER_00:So, in the years of firefighting, that's where we kind of can plug black back into well.
SPEAKER_01:I did want to ask, you're 12 years in with the fire department um at either house. Do you have like a story that sticks out in your head where you're like, Man, that was crazy, or man, that was cool. I worked with a lot of really good guys.
SPEAKER_02:Uh so I was fortunate. My first captain ever was a little short guy who was built like my fist. He was round and short, and you would never think a whole lot of him. His name was Bob. He was a fantastic fireman. Um, I had a really good first lieutenant, a guy named Eric, and I had a really good uh senior private, a guy named John, and they taught me a lot. They were really good to me. Um, they took care of me. Crazy stories. You see a lot, you see gunshot victims and things like that, and protocols make that uh a nightmare. So, for instance, you're you're essentially governed by a doctor who tells you whenever you're allowed to quit working a patient. Um, and the most ridiculous thing I ever saw was a clear headshot wound, gunshot. Um, they were clearly dead, but they still had a pulse because that takes time to go away, even if you're shot in the head. And we actually had to do compressions on this person while they had a gunshot wound and brain matter was coming out. And we're just sitting there like and we're we had to wait until we got a hold of the medical director to be. And it's one of it's a terrible, gruesome thing, and you're like, no one wants to carry this with them for the rest. No one wants this trauma of seeing this terrible thing. Yeah, let's see. But we have to do it because someone painted with broad strokes and said, Oh, if they have a pulse. Now, there are certain things like decapitation and things like that. It's immediate, you don't have to work them, even if they have a pulse. That one wasn't covered.
SPEAKER_01:Um, I made a really bad fire on I should also preface that we shouldn't get too gory. I don't know if we talked about that earlier. Tom will pass out like blood and guts and stuff.
SPEAKER_00:He will drop like a what's gonna say, what do you do to what do you do to cope with stuff like that? Getting out of the fire department. I was acting I was okay. I'm not sure if it was um psychopathy, probably.
SPEAKER_02:I don't know if it's something that you cope with over time. You know, they call it uh compassion fatigue and things like that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I get you.
SPEAKER_02:It just it I it wasn't that it never bothered me. It was for me, it was more of a these are things that happen in life. People do get in wrecks, they do get shot, they're it's gruesome and it's terrible, but it's a natural thing. Um the thing, the only things that ever really were tough on me, we made a couple kids that passed away in fires. We had a really bad fire that that was the only time I ever got burnt bad. I got second and third degree on my leg. Um old Gymtown house, it was a brick house. They had stuck two by fours to it and then drywall. We couldn't figure out we were opening up the hose on uh straight bore, which is most gallon per minute, and it's not dispersed, so it's not gonna steam you. Because if you open it up on a fog pattern, it's going to, especially intense heat, it's gonna burn out. Evaporate, it's gonna steam, and it's gonna burn the shit out of you. If you go straight bore, it's essentially like trying to boil a droplet of water, millions of them, versus a pot of water.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So we were straight bore and just getting cooked. And um, I was at the head of the nozzle with my captain right behind me, and I hit the drywall, and whenever I did, it all fell away. And then we realized what had happened was it was an arson, actually. And you can still you can find out the actual event. But a guy had um caught the downstairs on fire, and it ended up killing his daughter, his ex-girlfriend, and his ex-girlfriend here in this um father. So about the time that I hit the drywall and it started to fall away, we realized what had happened was so it was a brick building. They put two by fours on, and then they drywalled over. We were in an oven because all the fire was all the fire was between that drywall and the brick and just heating the brick up, and we were getting fucking cooked. I think seven or eight firefighters went to the hospital for minor. I got the worst of it. I had third degree and second degree on my leg, but everyone who is at the top of the stairs got first and second degree burns. Did you get the mermaid skin? Um, no, I actually I got de braised, but I ended up not having to get that. I was just shy of it, but I had to get de braised twice.
SPEAKER_00:One thing, so like before Evansville just got the new dog indie, I believe, for the fire department. Before that, how do our like how do they test? Because the dog can now smell accelerants and stuff like that now that that's on the force. But how did they test for that stuff beforehand? Is it just chemical analysis or the the people that they send to these schools?
SPEAKER_02:Um they're good at what they do. I will say, in my experience, generally, if someone's gonna burn down a house, just don't use an accelerant, and you'll probably get away with it because the way they usually teach you is accelerants are going to burn so hot so fast, they can tell based on the pattern where they can tell how how quickly it burned and like why is it so black here, but not everywhere else. It's because there's an accelerant used. Gotcha. Um, there's a lot of arson that happened. 90% of the fires we saw, everyone's like, Oh, they're probably electrical. A lot of times it's a bad investment someone bought, or homeless people have broken into a vacant house and they're starting fires. Yeah. We we went through whenever I first came on, I actually got into station in 2011. And my first two years, we had like 25 working house fires. So I got a lot of experience really quick, which that's a lot. Most people get maybe two to five a year because we're a fairly large city, and you might be on it, but you're not actually going to be in the door with the hose. You'll be, you know, running the pump or you're gonna be back up, you're gonna be on the roof cutting a ventilation hole. There's a lot of jobs that happen. But Gym Town, a lot of vacant houses, a lot of poverty. So there were a lot of people burning houses.
SPEAKER_01:How sketchy is that cutting the vent hole? Because you're essentially standing on top of a structure that's on fire. I mean it's not fully involved, obviously. Otherwise, they're not up there.
SPEAKER_02:But like, I mean Oh, they'll do it whenever it's fully going. There's picture, there's pictures of Evansville Fire Department venting a roof. It was the apartment complex on the corner of Burkhart and Lloyd Expressway. And they will do it full fire, blowing out the top, because that's the only if if you can't vent through a window, if you can't get inside, that's the only way you can do it.
SPEAKER_01:So, how sketchy is that? Because I mean, you could be moments away from like that's why they run those ladders and stuff. The structural lattice of the internals of that building just giving way. That's I mean how sketchy is that? Ladder ladder.
SPEAKER_02:I I only so I only did ventilation twice on working fires. I was an engine guy, so you have engines, ladders, and squads. And um, the ladder guys are just they're a different breed. They like that work, it fucking sucks. You have you have 80 pounds of gear on, and you're carrying a giant saw up and you cut a hole and get down as fast as you can. There's a really good photo of uh a guy named Anthony that I'm friends with. He came on a couple years before me, where him and an older guy were cutting a hole over on Burkhart Road, and it is you see them walking down the ladder and it's just eating ass right behind them. It's crazy. Um that is not like a dramatic depiction. This is real, this is real shit. Yeah, right. That's real because and it's not that the fire is waiting to bellow out, it is that like the smoke in there is actually combustible because it's small particles of you know plastic and other things. Yeah. And as soon as it as soon as that smoke hits oxygen, it just that's what a flashover is. Um, and that that is what they're doing is trying to ventilate all that shit out so the fire actually dies down.
SPEAKER_01:Oh god, it makes my nipples hurt.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, getting out of the fire department. Where does this story like transition into you? We kind of mentioned it earlier. You were going through a breakup at the time, you hit up an old buddy, he had you come to his house. What what happens when you go to his house?
SPEAKER_02:He finally so I had bought the Mortal Kombat for he was like, Oh, I got something in my house, and I love Jared. I've always loved Jared, he's always been a funny guy. Our energies are just different. Yeah, um, so I was on a toy buy because I was like, I bought one arcade game. That's it. I didn't have any plans to buy other ones. And uh a guy called me and he's like, Hey, I got a whole ton of toys I want you to come get over in like an hour and ten minutes away. And I was like, Cool, I'll run my truck up there and I'll get them. Bring it over. And I mean it is boxes and boxes of G.I. Joe's and Ninja Turtles and all this shit. And I'm like, this is you know, I think I give them like a thousand dollars. It was probably worth four, but I was gonna have to go through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of games, cypher what's worth anything. Pair the G.I. Joe's with their guns so they're complete and worth more money.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And I'm getting in my truck and I was like, man, have a good day. He's like, Oh, do you buy arcade games? And I was like, It's crazy you say that. I literally just bought my first one. What do you have? He's like, Well, come out here. It is a dirt floor barn, um, and they're sitting on the dirt, and but it's a centipede, a mispac-man, and a ninja turtles. And I was like, Those are three quintessential. So I called Jared and I was like, Hey, I they're out in a barn, they probably don't work. He's like, What do you want for it? Probably need all new wires for mice. Everything was fucked. Yeah, you got mice and spiders, and so I called Jared and I was like, Hey, this guy's got, he's like, What does he want? And I turned to God, I was like, Hey, what do you want? He's a hundred bucks each, just get him out of here. And Jared was like, We'll figure it out, just put him in the truck. Buy them. And we we get them all, none of them work. Um, the ninja turtles, we still have the ninja turtles, it was destroyed by termites. Um, yeah, so I learned I learned how to Bondo and Scabin wood really quick, and I did all the body work for the longest time. Um, and we rehabbed it and refinished it. And so we had those three in his garage, and I brought them back. I dropped off the toys in my house, brought those to him, and he had just moved to Mount Vernon. He's like, What do you want to do with this? And I was like, I'll make you a deal. I was like, I bought them all, I will buy all the parts to fix all of them. You get them all working, and you can keep whichever one you want, and I'll take the other two. And he goes, Good fine by me. I he's like, He's like, timeline, and I was like, No timeline. I just I'd love to have a Ninja Turtles. Uh other than Simpsons, that was like my favorite game.
SPEAKER_01:Simpsons was dope, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:That was like my favorite arcade game to play at Chuck E. Cheese as a kid. So he was like, Well, you gotta come out to my grandparents for my stuff is, and I was like, Oh, he's got me now. I gotta go check it out. Yeah, his grandpa hated it, he hated the hobby, he thought it was a waste of time, and now for just because I'll forget, granddad loves us. He thinks what we're doing is wonderful and we're businessmen. His his granddad is extremely uh accomplished businessman, very, very, very well known, well off. So that's where culture gets it from. Yeah, it yeah, this is checking out, yeah. So we got those three, and I went to his granddad's where he kept a bunch of his crap, and it was he had saved a Playboy from the old Harpholes bar that was like half caught on fire.
SPEAKER_01:And he had two or three really good games.
SPEAKER_02:He had a couple games that were in pretty good shape and a couple pieces of crap. And um he was like, You should come down to Louisville with me to this bar called Zanza Bar that my buddy Ann sounds. Hell yeah. And I was like, Yeah, sure, whatever. So a couple weeks, like he's been working on the games, and I come out there and I'm sanding them and peeling everything off and getting them filled with Bondo, and I'm watching YouTube videos about how to like build a form so I can get a good 90-degree angle, and I'm having to learn how to use a router to cut for the T molding that piece of plastic on them and shit. So we're we're learning. So we go down to Zansbar and I Is this there right here? Yeah, Z Bar. It's about a hundred-year-old owned by the same family. A dude named Ansa owns it, one of the nicest dudes in the bar or pinball industry. Looks like a bathroom floor. He runs that too. That is actually not Zansbar, it's another thing that he runs down in Louisville in a food hall. But Zansbar is like a little, it's a really famous music venue. Like they had um Fiona Apple played there back whenever she was popular and shit. And uh built- It looks like Jack White built it. It is a it's a it's a music venue first that he decided to do our he was like one of the first arcade bars because he had that shit set up in like 1998. Wow.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um, so we go down there, and this is back whenever me and Jared both still drank at least once a week, and it was like a 12 beer every time. Yeah, kind of drink. Dump the clutch. So we go down there and we're we get there at like five, and it is midnight, and we're absolutely shit housed, and we've eaten their hot brown sandwich that is wonderful. And uh we play some of their pinballs, and we're just talking about I knew nothing about pinball, I knew a little bit now about arcade games, and Jared he liked pinball more. And we played some of the games, and I was like, we could do this, like we could like there's only like 20 games in here and it's hot and they're you know, they're here for more than just yeah, you know, but I was like, we could do this, like you know, and he's like, Yeah, we could. And I was like, Yeah, but why would we? Like, you're you sell insurance and do well, and I'm a firefighter. And yeah, we went back to the hotel, passed out, woke up the next day, drove home, didn't talk to him for probably a month. And I called him and I was like, we should do that. He's like, What? I was like, do an arcade bar, and he was like, Yeah, we should. He was on board immediately. We both had the same thought. We just I think I breached it first. And uh we at that point started working on games and looking for them and actually seeking them out. And I had a lot of connections because of action figures and buying. I went everywhere. You're in that world already. Yeah, so I went from here. To Ohio, to Indianapolis, to Michigan. I would buy truckloads of toys already. To buy an arcade game? Before high score, yeah. Oh fuck. So I've shipped stuff from Japan now. I don't drive anymore. But the furthest I ever drove, um, Jared drove to Moyne, Iowa, so like seven and a half hours away. I was a jog, brother. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I was a jog.
SPEAKER_02:We've we've gone to Chicago multiple times. We've gone to Alabama a couple times. Uh he went to Florida one time for something, but it was like right on the panhandle. But back whenever we didn't have money, um, so I mean, essentially the way we got started is we had done this, and I used to fight for a guy named Jeff who owned an organization called Hook and Shoot.
SPEAKER_01:I remember Hook and Shoot here in Evansville. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I I used to fight on that years and years ago, and he was opening up a little comic shop called Secret Headquarters. That's an eight-hour, three-minute drive, just for the record, folks. We yeah, we did that's a jog that was for a hook pinball because Jared loves the movie Hook more than anything. So we had to have that. Oh, yeah, I get it. I get it. But uh a guy that I used to fight for is opening up a comic shop, and I messaged him and I was like, hey, let me, I've got like five arcade games, let me put them in there. It'll like kind of make it more of a retro thing and we'll split the money. And he was like, No, it's not that's stupid. Arcades aren't big. I was like, Yeah, but they're making a comeback. I was like, they're never gonna be a standalone arcade, it's never gonna make money. But if you pair something with it, like beer or a comic shop, it just adds to the atmosphere. He's like, No, it's dumb. I was like, do me a favor, just uh put it up there and see what people say. So he put a really generic like picture that he found on Google, copyright infringement, IP infringement of like five games. And he's like, We're gonna have arcades here. And um, it went bonkers. It got like 1200 likes in 24 hours, and he called me, he's like, How many games can you get me? And I was like, 15? None. We're opening our own plane. Yeah. And we managed to, and we were fucking, I was using every spare cent that I had for my checks to get them. So we ended up filling up like a 600 square foot room with like 15, 20 games. I think it was like 15 or 16 to start, and it was not killer shit. Like we had the staples like Gallagher, Miss Pac-Man, Ninja Turtles, X-Men, Qbert, Donkey Kong. Simpsons? No, we didn't have that one yet. Oh son of a bitch. It was it was nothing crazy good, but he charged five dollars an hour and then two fifty for each additional hour. And we'd already put a game at a comic shop down in Owensboro called um Big Bang Toys and Comics, and it made like the first time we ever made money, we had two in a bowling alley and one there, and we made like$300 the first month, and we were like, holy shit, we can buy half an arcade game with this. And we thought we just thought it was cool to make residual income.
SPEAKER_01:We're on to something here.
SPEAKER_02:So we did I I didn't really know if that would work, but I knew what our goal was, which was an arcade bar. And uh we did the secret headquarters thing, and after a month went by, he told me he's like it did four grand. So the split the split was 25, 2550. So me and Jared each got a grand.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_02:And that that's never we went, oh, and Jared was like, I'm gonna, and I was like, we're doing nothing but buying more games. Like this is our springboard onto what's next. We're jumping into this 100%. Everything we had for we were there for about 18 months, and everything that we that we made went directly into buying more arcade games. Um fast forward about I think he opened in 2015. Fast forward 2016, I'm looking at the secret headquarters in? Okay. Yeah. I'm looking everywhere for um retail spaces to open up a bar. I didn't realize how hard it was to open up a bar because of liquor licenses. Oh yeah. It's night. Only place we could get it done was downtown because they have something they're trying to revitalize it. They're trying to bring people in. So your liquor license, instead of having to buy one as a piece of property, which is how it operates here, you get a one-year license for a thousand dollars and you but you don't own anything. You are given a ticket that says you are allowed to sell beer for a year and your expense on that is one grand. Whereas generally, buying a liquor license in Indiana, it is like buying a house. You have it like essentially a deed that you are this deed comes with me and I can put it in a different building and I can now serve alcohol there. Can I put it in two different buildings? No.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, it's like one per establishment.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. But you can take that liquor license and move it to a different building. And you they sell for like$80,000 now.
SPEAKER_01:It's no and it's a one-time fee, right? Like you just pay the$80,000 once.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you're not getting it from the government, you're buying it from me or my dad who bought a liquor license 90 years ago. It's a really fucked up system.
SPEAKER_01:Establishment before. And then now that you're buying this building, the option for you to buy the liquor license is there, but you've got to pay the 80,000, right? Yeah. So I gathered.
SPEAKER_02:If I were to buy a Lamasco bar, yeah, she can sell that liquor license to me, and I can go open up a bar on the east side with it, and then you just get an empty bar. Or you get an empty building.
SPEAKER_01:It moves around. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So I guess a bar is not just a bar, a bar has to have a liquor license. And it's two different pieces of property. So if you buy a bar, you're usually buying the liquor license and the property. That's in Indiana. It's a fucked up sit, it's it's a fucked up system, and it's very unfair, and it's very predatory. Yeah, it seems so.
SPEAKER_00:So you basically when you guys open, you're like leasing a liquor license until you can find somebody.
SPEAKER_02:They want to revitalize downtown Evansville, and they did back in 2017 too. So they were offering something called a redevelopment district license that is$1,000. And I was like, I can swing a thousand, I can't swing 35.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I found this little basement. It had failed multiple times, um, 323 Main Street. It had been a wine bar, it had been a sushi bar called Babbel, and no one had rented it for like two years. So I got a hold of this guy, Mike, and I was like, hey, we want to open up an ar, you know, an arcade that serves, we're just gonna want to do beer and wine. Yeah. He's like, Yeah, yeah, sure. Like that would be great. We go through a bunch of stuff, we make announcements, you know. I get stuff made. This is uh we open up in December, this is back in like April.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah, this is right below that crazy church place.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. It's right, so the church is to the right, uh-huh, and then we're right there underneath it. Yeah, so we're in the basement of that. So I get a cease and desist letter like a month and a half later, and I was like, What is this? So the condo association had language that said any business can come down here and they're allowed to serve beer, wine, liquor. You're just not allowed to be a bar. And I was like, We're literally that. We're an arcade though we are an arcade that is just serving beer. We're not even gonna have hard liquor. And they were like, That's a bar. So lawsuit um began.
SPEAKER_01:Are you shitting me?
SPEAKER_02:We got sued before we ever made a dollar. So I had about 30.
SPEAKER_01:That's why no one's business is working out down there.
SPEAKER_02:So I so they ended up being really good people, and I understood why. There was a bar down there previously called Babbel that was a sushi bar, and they would like leave raw fish in the trash cans. Ah, we'll take it out the next day. And these are 150 to 400,000 condos above them that are just reeking of fish. And I'd been to Babbel back whenever my buddy ran it. Yeah, he he would overserve everybody, yeah. Everywhere, everyone left there so drunk you were throwing up out frats. Yeah, just blacking out. It was a college bar in a multi-million dollar condo associated. It should have never happened. I understood their grief with it. Um, they sued us. I had about 30 grand set aside, and I down to the penny I knew how much it was gonna cost us probably to get open. And that lawsuit ate up 20,000 like that, real quick. Ate up 20,000 for them to eventually go, okay, you guys, you're good. You're legit. It well, no, it came to a head where they knew who we were to some degree. I mean, they they had a lawyer, they were combing our Facebook. If we had if we had ever fucked up and called it a bar, they would have had us dead to rides because the language was a business can operate down here and serve beer, wine, liquor, it just can't be a bar. I at no point on any of the social media called us a bar because I truly, in my heart, didn't feel like we were a bar. We wanted to be an arcade that offered beer. I didn't really care about the alcohol part that much. Yeah, my Chuck E. Cheese now offers beer. I I knew that was what was gonna make the money, but it was about the games for me, and it still is and always will be.
SPEAKER_01:Um the drinks. I think they would have gotten a little saucy had you guys maybe started offering like some tuna wraps or anything.
SPEAKER_02:No, they they didn't like us. They they didn't like that was gonna, they're like, well, it's gonna be loud because it says no bowling alley down here. I'm like, we're not gonna. They tried to pick, they tried to pick us apart in every way, and I think they started to realize like they were probably gonna lose. And everyone's, you know, unfortunately, it was me and Jared. We spent about$20,000 on our lawyer. They had like six members, so those six people, they only spent like$3,500. But we were at one of our last meetings, and there was a really nice guy who was running the condo association, who I I like him. He's a great person. I have utmost respect for him. He was just acting in the interest of a bunch of 50 plus people who just didn't want us in the basement. Right. And we were we had uh gone to court yet again, and it got pushed back yet again because they were just trying to wear us out. And um, we were sitting there and he was like, I know this isn't your fault. This is the guy who rented it to you wasn't upfront and honest about what we would allow. That sucks. He was like, So just back out of this. He's like, just back out and we'll we'll deal with him, and you guys, you guys can get out of this. He's like, because he will let you out of that lease. He's like, we'll make sure of it. He's like, what is it gonna take for you guys to just go away and let us deal with the gentleman?
SPEAKER_01:And me and Jared were such a brash with$40,000.
SPEAKER_02:What's it gonna take for you guys just sitting at the courthouse because we were because we never we never made it into the courtroom. We always would sit on benches, the lawyers would go in for three minutes, nothing would happen. I would get a bill for$4,000, and they'd say, Hey, we have to come back in a month, we have more stuff to talk about.
SPEAKER_01:That's the word.
SPEAKER_02:So that and that happened like three times. And so the guy who ran the condo association was like, What is it gonna take for you guys to go away? And I it probably wouldn't have worked, but I was so mad that we just got dismissed in two minutes for like the third time. I turned to him and I said, I'm gonna make you fucking kill me to ever go away. And the next day we got a letter, they were dropping it. And Jared was like, I think he thought you were gonna mortgage your house. I was like, I would. I was so mad at that point, I would have sold my retirement. I was so pissed.
SPEAKER_01:Before we go any further, I fucking love that advanced. I was furious. Hell yeah, dude.
SPEAKER_02:I was I was mad because it was a bunch of rich people using their money to make sure we didn't get to do it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, empty my pockets. Oh, fuck you.
SPEAKER_02:And that that was I think that was their plan because they're they're all very affluent, wealthy people. Yeah, I didn't understand it. I didn't understand why they were so upset initially. I didn't understand that the guy who was renting to us had let multiple bird eggs move in. Yeah, and I I just had to kind of tuck well and be like, we're not gonna be that those people. We just did it right. Yeah, we were there for five years, and we had like one noise complaint the entire time. Because if people got crazy or got, you know, we didn't overserve people, but if they got out of hand, we just said, hey guys, it's we're here for fun. You're not we we had one fight the entire time. It was actually a buddy of mine punched another buddy of his, and we had no problems, and they actually really softened to us, and years later, they were like, We are so sorry we went through all that. We didn't know your character, we didn't know you guys would run it like this.
SPEAKER_01:Like, also, can I get that fucking 20k back?
SPEAKER_02:So the reason high score opened the way it did is we got we had secret headquarters, we were making this money, we saved up all this money. I knew how much it was gonna cost, we got sued, and it was like November, about this time, like November 25th, 30th. And uh, I said, Hey, we're gonna open up in two weeks to Jared. He was like, We're not ready. I said, We have to. We're opening up in two weeks. I said, We're just gonna have to fucking do it. We the day we opened, we had six hundred dollars left in the bank account. And I told him, I said, this is either gonna work really big or we are really fucked.
SPEAKER_01:And uh bankruptcy is in both of our near futures.
SPEAKER_02:In the first month, it was it, I mean, it was now would be like a crummy week, but our first month we did so much we were able to we we had 20 grand packed back in the bank in two months. That's like wow after now. We also didn't I didn't pay myself for three years, so that is a consideration too.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you had your you kept the fire department.
SPEAKER_02:Jared left his job immediately because we needed to was he getting paid for those three years? Yes, he got paid a whopping two thousand dollars a month for the first two years. So he's essentially not getting paid. Roger that guy. He made no money, yeah, he made enough to survive.
SPEAKER_01:He's still eating ramen just praying to God this works out.
SPEAKER_02:How many years ended until you guys opened Ready Player Two? So we had been working arcade games since 2012. So we were five years in by the time we got fucked the first time doing this. Yeah, and then player two was really never supposed to exist. We were paying a fortune in storage unit fees, and I told Jared, I was like, everyone always wants us because we did charity events, like we did the student lunch debt payoff and other shit. We did some pretty large-scale charity events for the community, and people always like, Oh, what about a place for kids? And I was just like, I watched Two Bit Bandit fail, you know. But they stayed open a while, they made it a while. Yeah, they yeah, they made it.
SPEAKER_00:A portion of that was batting cages, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Batting cages and basketball, and they just made it off their name alone. That whenever the original people sold it to the next guy, he didn't know what he was doing. Really nice guy, but he just didn't have any experience. He just thought arcade games work and they don't, they're constant maintenance. It's like a vending machine, yeah. I mean, they're the worst because kids are beating the shit out of them. Yeah, um so uh I was just like, ah, like I'd love to do something for kids, but it just won't make any money. And then so Secret Headquarters essentially called me one night and he was like, I want you guys out. And we were like, What the we had a disagreement, a couple of them, and it his his feeling was we were giving way too much attention to the bar, and it was gonna hurt his business that he didn't want in the first place, the arcades. And I was just like, Okay, so we he pushed us out, he got his own arcade games, and we took all of ours from there, which was like 25, and we had a couple failures. Like we opened up at Comic Quest, and it just stuff it wasn't a good fit. Comic Quest is wonderful. I've been going there since I was a little tough. Itty bitty tucked back and that was back whenever they were rural king, and they they did great business, but comics and arcade games I learned does not always have a fold over. You have comic people, you have arcade people, then you have people like me who just like the pop culture. Yeah, we we failed there. Um, and then I just told Jerry, I was like, what if we just because I don't want to pay storage unit fees for 40 arcade games, we're talking at$1,500 a month. I was like, what if I find a little shitty building on the west side that's ready and we could drop 10 grand on it and maybe just break even? We did. And um we signed the lease on January 1st of 2020, and of course, nothing bad happened in 2020. So we signed it, and then COVID fucking hit. Motherfucker! So fortunately, fortunately, our landlord was a really cool dude named Jared, and he was like, I'm not gonna charge you guys rent until you can open, which is the only cool thing a landlord has ever done. They're just good dudes. Oh, dude, he is like the most up-home country. This is the one this is the one on Sontag. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, I know.
SPEAKER_02:We opened up that, never thought we'd make a dime, and arguably didn't. I think our first year we did like 40,000 in sales, which is nothing for a brick and mortar.
SPEAKER_01:Consider what you have to pay for the place.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, rent, utilities, because we we've always maintained like a I think our lowest we ever paid was$13 an hour, and that's starting like 2017. Our minimum wage right now is$16.50. So we've all which isn't it's not great, but it's a hell of a lot better than most. I mean, you don't get factory jobs around here that pay$17 an hour. My door guy makes$17 an hour. That's insane. Yeah, so we try to take care of you for that, dude.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, to me, it's always been it is the right thing to do because I worked for poverty wages, and I was like, this is not right. You have a you have a Corvette. Yeah, like, and I don't I don't need a Corvette.
SPEAKER_01:Gas is five dollars a gallon, bro.
SPEAKER_02:When we were kids, dude. I worked at Domino's making shit money. Um, and I worked at multiple businesses, local places too. Mom and pop's also don't care about people, FYI. A lot of them don't, some of them do, but corporate and mom and pop is just the mom and pop is the guy who hasn't made it yet. But yeah, people always ask me, like, oh, like you you'd never sell out. And I'm like, I would wear the fucking rat suit tomorrow if you gave me two million. I don't care. I want I want my people to get paid. Oh, yeah, dude. I want to keep my vision within a certain standard, but like, you know, we we added claw machines. I don't like claw machines, but claw machines make great money and allows me to pay my guys good wages and give them paid vacation.
SPEAKER_01:I fucking love a claw machine. They they do great. People people dig the hell out of them. We just put 12 in. Fucking um Toy Story. That's when my love of claw machines happened. I think that was our entire journey. The little aliens, dude, where it's just like me, dude. So fuck yeah, bro.
SPEAKER_02:This play player two pretty much came out of I didn't want to pay storage unit fees, and I found a building and we built it out, and we did it just it did okay. We were able to pay our guys, we would work like a shift a week, and I think for that we paid ourselves like$150 a month. So I was paying myself like$2 an hour to work there or something. But I wasn't paying a bunch of storage unit fees and da-da-da-da-da. Because we like to swap games. We had if you have$50 on the floor, you need to have a hundred so you can rotate it out and keep it fresh. Yeah, and then I expanded in we had the opportunity to move next door, and I was like, we can either keep doing this next door on Main Street, no, next door at the kids' arcade. Okay, okay. And I was like, we can either keep just trudging along and making no money, or I can try to take this from a little hobbyist spot to an actual attraction, and we'll import games from Japan. I'll spend another$30,000,$40,000 on new games, we'll build out party rooms. And I got the blessing of Jared to do it, and uh we went from eh to holy shit, this actually not makes a ton of money, but it makes money now. Comfortable overhead. Yeah. Um yeah, brother. And then we got the chance to buy the building that we're at down on Main Street. So we've Yeah, what's the building you're at now? What's the it's a block away? It's 309 Main Street. It used to be an antique store called Decades of Design. We actually bought the building. Um, the holes in the roof were so big I could jump through the roof into the attic. Oh we spent$700,000 rehabbing the building.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah, it's a good thing that wasn't expensive. Yeah, I'm married to that building until I die. Uh yeah, you should. You should stay there for a while. Yeah, you should not move.
SPEAKER_02:So is this eventually gonna be like a multi-level arcade? We are working on the second floor. We had funding for it from the bank. We got approved for the SBA. Um, then the government shutdown happened, and SBA loans are obviously governmental loans.
SPEAKER_01:Is this what we were talking about pre-recording? The SBA thing. Are you okay talking about it? Yeah, I don't mind.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, I mean, there's nothing, you know, there's nothing but it was all for moving to the second floor. Yeah, so we were gonna open up a music venue, comedy club. Um, I'm a big comedy show guy. Oh, yeah, but I'm actually I got featured in a guy named Jeff R. Curie, if you know who that is. I was in one of his things. I was I was in one of his videos whenever he had like 20,000 followers, and now he blew up. What's his name? Jeff R. Curie. He's really funny. He does the best crowd work I've ever seen. Fuck yeah. I went to see him in Chicago because I started going to more I've seen Bill Burr and Tom Segura before he got really big too. And a lot of these guys, I used to just travel around and go to comedy shows. Yeah. And I was like, I want Evansville to have comedy. God, and not just like a dude who went to my high school and tells jokes. I want to bring in other comedy acts too.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, get a guy from Milwaukee down here.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, you can have you can have your local guys do openers and stuff like that. Yeah, but if you have the same guy doing comedy at four bars in a week, it doesn't work just like live music doesn't work if you watch the same people. People play every week. Yeah. So our second floor is about forty four hundred square feet blank canvas. We got approved for another massive soul crushing loan to do that. Um, it was through all the paperwork. I had to do it multiple times and go through massive like how much inventory do you have? How much cash is in the bank? Let me see what's in your Roth IRA, what's your equity? Tons and tons and tons of forms. Just loophole after loophole jumping. And we got we got to the finish line and I called and I was like, hey, you said we'd be ready like October, we'd have some funds released. He said, Yeah, man, it's an SBA loan. The government shutdown just put push this all back. And because it pushed it back, whenever you do a loan, there's like an amorization period where you have to resub now we have to resubmit everything. Fuck. Because it's been more than like eight. They need they need they need updated financials.
SPEAKER_00:But the beauty of it is that like the Evansville comedy scene is dying for a place like this.
SPEAKER_02:Like they're all gonna eat it up. We'll do music shows too, because like I love a lot of the bands that come here, but like I want to see I don't need to see a big band, but like I'd love to see a medium-sized band like built to spill or something that I listened to whenever I was a kid that can draw a crowd of three, four hundred.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, dude.
SPEAKER_02:Um, I you know, I don't need to have the Ford Center, I want to see it like the um Bluebird up in India or up in Bloomington. Oh, Bluebird. Yeah, crushes, dude.
SPEAKER_01:That's where I saw Corey Smith for the first time. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_02:It's a good medium-sized venue that's intimate, but they can get 400 people in there at 20 bucks a ticket. They can pay their overhead, they make money on drinks, and I was like, Evansville has a massive venue that can't fill anything. The Ford Center, you know, if it's not country or like disturbed, it's not coming close to selling out. It just is what it is. And the Victory can have some pretty good sized shows, and they're considerably smaller, but I'm like, we need a good medium-sized venue. So that is my next and probably final endeavor for business in Evansville. Um, it's not fun running a business here. The bureaucratic tape is I want to get into that. Oh, explain that.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I wouldn't, I wouldn't deal maybe dabble with that. You don't want to hurt business.
SPEAKER_01:Well, let's talk about it from like a municipality standpoint. What is the worst part about finagling? Can we talk about that? Yeah, what what's the worst part about like what's so painful? I because just as someone who like you're talking to someone who's essentially an entrepreneur. I'm not really an entrepreneur, but I I like I could see myself getting on board or becoming invested in something. But like, what is the worst part about opening shop in Evansville, Indiana and like running a business here as a smaller business?
SPEAKER_02:Entities do not communicate with each other. So the building commission does not talk to the Evansville Water Sewer Commission, does not talk to the fire department, does not talk to zoning, does not talk about it.
SPEAKER_00:You saw this happen in Boonville with Stoner's Bar and Grill.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you you get different answers from different people. Stoners that just got torn down, I believe.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and they got fined. Yeah. They had a so Stoners was attached to like a three-building complex, and the state, like the the building over here, not that was attached to stoners, but not stoners, was like falling apart. So the city took a bid, they came and tore it down, but when they tore it down, they damaged stoners. So stoners had to close, and then they were getting fined for being damaged. And so, like, it was a whole ordeal, stoners couldn't open, and eventually stoners was like, just tear it down.
SPEAKER_02:Fuck. I'll tell you what happened on our side that really soured me was we hired an architect, which is not a cheap endeavor, but our building was so big we had to go through electrical diagrams, plumbing. Because, like, there some things are very understandable, like grease traps. We should have had those in Evansville years and years ago. It destroyed the infrastructure that we didn't have then. Um, we went through all this, had fire plans, escape plans, you know, how the electrical was all gonna run, how the layout was gonna be. Yeah, you have to have capacity because obviously, you know, you don't want to have scenario there's 400 people in a hundred capacity place, yada yada yada. Yeah, like first world country type of thing. We we get to the finish line and the fire department comes in and goes, where's your alarm system? And I was like, Doesn't we don't have to have one? He goes, Well, yeah, you do. And I said, These are the plans that you signed off on that are allowed by the state. We we meet all state mandates. And he goes, No, you have to have one. They forced us to put a$40,000 alarm system in a week before we were supposed to open. So, on top of me having to draw 40 grand out of my retirement to cover it because we are low on money again, it also pushed us back opening three weeks at like the busiest time of the year, like June, July. Right. Um, for no reason, other than a guy did not look over the paperwork properly. And I you have a lot of stuff come across your desk, but Evansville is not well funded. We do not have the people in the positions that there need to be to do these things. Um you have you have people that are well-intentioned and good guys wearing three hats that should not be wearing three hats. You need to have one really good hot guy wearing one really good hat instead of one guy wearing three really shitty hats, and that tends to be what you have. Right. And now with center point, um, our water bills are through the roof too.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, down the whole city of Evansville is through the roof. I was just talking to Jeremiah about that the other day.
SPEAKER_02:I just made a post about this because it's actually I'm I'm a numbers person. It drives Jared crazy that I am I know every I know how much we have spent on everything ever. I can whenever we went to get this last loan, I look a certain way and I understand that, but we went to the bank to get a certain loan and I had done projections for 12 months.
SPEAKER_00:You're like the accountant of the what the how is it a barcade?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I I do all of our our numbers, and whenever we went to get the next loan for the upstairs, they were like, You did all these projections, right? And I was like, Yeah, she's like, Do you know you were within half a percent of every single month? She's like, We've never had anyone be that accurate. And I was like, This is all I do. I love numbers more than anything. And I was just I made a post on Facebook about this. It is now cheaper to live in Indianapolis, Louisville, and St. Louis than it is Evansville because of our utility fees. What the fuck? And you extrapolate that further. So yeah, to get a house in Louisville, you're they're more expensive. Yeah. You're gonna have a mortgage that might be a thousand dollars. Yeah, but you're paying wages higher. Yeah, so not only is your paying wage higher, you have to think about like this. If you buy a house in Louisville and it costs a thousand dollars a month, and your house in Evansville costs$700 a month, well, your utilities already bring you up to that thousand, but the house in Louisville is also gonna appreciate in value considerably more because it's a larger metropolitan area with more job opportunities.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so you're gaining on an investment.
SPEAKER_02:You're gaining on it both sides because there's more job opportunities to make more money. Evansville is no longer a good place to live for affordability. I actually have I have been wanting to move to St. Louis and work remotely for a while because they're gonna force people out. Like you thought about franchising and opening something like this in St. Louis? No, you know, as much as I say I'll wear the rat suit, I would never want someone to put their hands on something that I put my name on. I do still love what we do. I do still very much there's certain things we don't do that people are like I'll sell out a little bit, like we'll do little things. If I still think it's in good taste and good fund, i i it I'll do it. But if it's something that is just bogus and ugly and dumb, I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna do something that I don't believe. And I would just go back and get another corporate job if I hate it. Um yeah, it's just to to franchise to me, I respect the people that do it because that is a massive undertaking. You have to really uh have organizational skills to put people in positions to do the things that you want done. I'm way too much of a control freak. That's probably the better answer. I'm a control freak. I wouldn't do well with it.
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna rattle off a bunch of ADHD questions here. You ready? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. What are what like what are your like do you have a game that you refuse to put out on the floor? It's like your pride and pride, like pride and joy.
SPEAKER_02:No, because I I honestly I'm a firm believer. You know, me and my ex-girlfriend, we played a game called Animal Crossing together. Never thought I would like it. You don't fight anything, you don't really do anything, you just make a little town. It's not even like The Sims, but uh you you're a little guy and you have animal neighbors, but it was I played it and it really helped like my depression during COVID just to have something. But then like I like um yeah, today I was playing a Metroidvania, which is you know like a Castlevania or Metroid style game, and I'll play Final Fantasy games and RPGs, and I grew up on World of Warcraft and Ultima. I think all games are good. There it's just is it the game for I think all art is good, it's interpretive. Um, so I would never not put something out because I thought it sucked.
SPEAKER_00:I think what is meant like some like if you got one of these games that was like your pride and joy, like your favorite game that you don't want to put it in the store for somebody, some kids, something you're hoarding.
SPEAKER_02:I actively so Medieval Madness is a pinball machine I always wanted. That game is$12,000, and I put it on the floor for people to beat the shit out of. So after that, I'm like, it I've never owned a car that costs$12,000. I drove here in a 2002 Ford Ranger with 207,000 miles.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah, dude.
SPEAKER_02:My pinball machines are more valuable than anything I own.
SPEAKER_00:What about um so you said Jared does most of the repair stuff other than like cosmetic and like boxes? You said you do a lot of that work. Did you ever try? Like a little bit.
SPEAKER_02:We just man, it was one of those things, and I know how to do enough to be dangerous. I can do like drop targets, I can do a little bit on flippers, I can replace a button. But it's one of those things. Whenever you hire a general contractor, the plumber does the plumbing and the you know, the electrician does the electrical work. We found out really quick. He was better and made less mistakes. If I started putting him on, like, hey, go do inventory, or he was like, Hey, can you go fix this? It was better for us to just go let it be broken for a day, let it not be done for the day, wait till the person who's good at it does it because we're you're just more efficient doing what you're good at. Now, in emergency situations, I can handle a lot and Jared can too. Like if Jared's away on vacation, what we've the button in. The happy median that we actually found was Jared has about eight games upstairs at all times, at least, fully working. So if one of our games break if Jared's on vacation and seven games break down, I just start getting in the elevator and bringing working games down and replace them.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, thank god you have an elevator. What what um how much harder is a pinball to restore than an arcade game?
SPEAKER_02:So hard that we don't do it. We will get them working, but as far as like the play field, if it's blown out, that's a piece of wood that had lacquer and hand paint. Yeah. We'll get them working, but you know, your standard arcade machine is gonna have Miss Pac-Man. You have a joystick that is a four-way, eight-way joystick depending on the game. So it has joystick that fits in here, has a little like E-clip, a locking clip, and it can go a certain amount of ways. It has switches, so you have to have a few.
SPEAKER_00:Like a stick shift in a vehicle.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, except for this is just switches where whenever I move the joystick that way, two little things touch and they tell it to go that way. So you have four to eight of those, depending, usually four, but some are double pronged anyway. And then you have, like on Galaga, you have a button that lets you fire, which is again, you can press it, two little things touch, and tells the game to fire. Um, pinball machine, you have a flipper that has to have a proper flipper coil in it, has to have proper sleep sleeve, an end-to-stroke switch. Every mechanism on there, from like whenever a ball goes into a hole and kicks out, you have a solenoid of some kind in there that kicks that out. Uh, everything that like goes and scores a point, there is some kind of opto that sends a relay to the board to tell it to do that. I mean, a pinball machine inherently has three to five boards in it. So you're gonna have your like a soundboard, sound and um voiceover, power board, your MPU, which is essentially the computer. Um, you might have like a driver board. An arcade is simple, simple, simple, simple. In addition to they don't have a one-ounce ball bearing bouncing around at 35 miles an hour hitting shit. Um, if you look at the bottom side of a pinball machine versus the inside of an arcade machine, you'll go, I get it. Immediately that's just beat. The first time I saw the inside of a pinball machine, whenever they flip up the play field, I went, I don't want to ever own any of those. Jared. And he convinced me to, and now we have 40 of them.
SPEAKER_00:What about so on the west side? There used to be a place next to family video where like people could go in and like rent out like a like a land lobby, basically, or like a place to play COD and stuff like that. Is that in the cards for you guys for the future? Some old Halo parties upstairs or we have had land parties and we're gonna have more.
SPEAKER_02:So I grew up on a game called Ultima Online, which was like the original world, it was the first MMORPG ever made. And then I played World of Warcraft, I've played every MMO. We actually have a guy that throws a land party like every year at the kids' arcade, which is weird because they just rent out the party room and bring computers and don't touch anything else. They just love the atmosphere, right? And that's really cool for me because I was a like it wasn't even Call of Duty back then. It was a game called Unreal Tournament and Doom and things like that that you played online.
SPEAKER_00:Dude, how um yeah, I play a lot of life, a lot of tribal wars and age empires. I was getting down on some age empires before this. So fun.
SPEAKER_02:I actually just played the original uh Warcraft, Warcraft 2, where you're like the citizens and the orcs, and you have to like run mobs of people over. I just I'm a big DOS box guy, like the games from the 80s and 90s, those are the coolest shit in the world to me.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah, dude. I never got into the RPGs, like the Final Fantasies.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, well, that's like I mean, Skyrim was the first RPG I got into. And that's even like a open world RPG. Yeah, and then you know, Elden Ring comes out, and now they did what Red Dead Redemption and stuff along those lines. Oh yeah. What's what's been one of your favorite parts about owning the arcade?
SPEAKER_02:Um favorite memories are things that will spiral out of control in a good way. So, like we used to do a charity night one Friday a month, and it would be like essentially all the pinballs, anything you put into them, we would donate to charity. We'd have a five-dollar cover, and all that money would go to charity. And one month I did um student lunch debt for the EVSC because I was a free lunch kid. Oh, yeah. We didn't have a whole lot. We raised like$1,400. It was a really cool cause. And I called Maureen afterward, who was my contact, and I was like, hey, I'm gonna bring you this check. She's like, Yeah, sure. I went into her office and I gave it to her, and I was like, Yeah, it's so cool. She's like, Oh, thank you guys so much. I was like, Yeah, how much more is left on the student lunch debt? Because you never really think about it. And this is just kids who owe 30 cents or a dollar at a time. Yeah, yeah. And she was like, Do you really want to know? And I was like, Well, yeah, like I'm asking. And it was like$54,000. And I was like, Holy shit. So we spent the next month rallying. This is 2019. Um, we rallied multiple businesses to pay off the student lunch debt. Yeah. Um, that was, I think we donated that money to someone's veteran bill. We do all, we've given away, way too much money. Um you can never give away enough money, dude. But for the student lunch debt, we got like a car lot, tattoo studio, a coffee shop. We ended up raising, we paid off, we paid off enough of the student lunch debt that the state of Indiana took notice. And I want to say they ended up like relieving the rest of it and then doing free lunches for the entire summer for the EVS. That's awesome. No, we didn't hit mission first to hit up them.
SPEAKER_01:No, kidding, dude. That actually that's a really good plug. Remind me, yeah. Remind uh, yeah, don't let us forget. We need to talk about that when this is over.
SPEAKER_02:And then we just did the uh Tri-State Food Bank. You always see people who are like, oh, like you know, thank you so much to our patrons, to our customers. So we the government shut down again. I was we were on government assistance whenever for a short time, whenever my dad was gone and things like that. Absolutely. So I donated a thousand dollars to through our business through the uh to the tri-state food bank because for every dollar equated to six meals, which is an insane ratio. Right. And I was like, that's the best bang for your buck. And I challenged other businesses. I was like, you always talk about how much you love your patrons and how much you love Evansville. Show it. And we actually I called it shaming, and it was shaming. I shamed enough businesses. We ended up getting that we were able to record$27,000 with donated to them in 24 hours. So you bullied 26 people into getting so we what we did is I started doing a leaderboard. I was like, who is I was like, who's gonna beat us? Because here's a thousand. The next person did like a thousand and two, and the next person did like a thousand and three, and then someone, I think an eye doctor came up, they're like, We're gonna do three grand. Oh yeah. And we actually had two individuals. One's a guy named Scott, who's just a great dude. He date who he donated a thousand, and then some lady from Newburgh donated the most, like thirty five hundred dollars. Wow.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah, dude. Big shoots to her. Yeah, so sick, dude.
SPEAKER_02:I found out really quick that the coolest things we do are always just it's an idea that we're like, let's just let's just see if we can get it to catch on. Let's just see if we can make it go viral.
SPEAKER_01:Like we put up that billboard that said let's go bully some people for money.
SPEAKER_02:Uh they have it. Fuck them. Like, you have money. I see the shit you have in your business. I know, I know what a new core is.
SPEAKER_01:You know what kind of car you drive, dude.
SPEAKER_02:So you can give a thousand dollars for six thousand meals to feed the community that you say you care about.
SPEAKER_01:You your ethos, like your I your aura, dude, is very I'm on board with everything you're selling, dude. The fact that you drive an O2 Ranger, the fact that you're selfless, the fact that you've busted ass and rolled the dice so many times that you've lost count at this point. Like it was always have a lot of courage and a lot of uh selflessness in you.
SPEAKER_02:I never wanted to because I made money. So there were the everyone asked why I quit the fire department. There was a time I think I made like$120,000 a year, and I went, that was the worst year of my life. I worked so I worked so many hours, and all I did was put imaginary numbers in an imaginary hole, which is a bank. Yeah, I I'd not I will never want to jet ski. I don't want a new car, I like my little house, and I was like, I miss my dog at the time. I was with a girl who I loved very much. Yeah, I miss my girl. Her mom, yeah, her mom had a terminal illness, and I wasn't able to be there for them the way that I wanted to be. And I was able to quit to be there for them the last six months. She was with us, and I was like, I none of this matters. It's all I'm gonna die one day. It's all I'm not gonna care about it. All I'm gonna care about is, you know, you need to make enough money to live and maybe some emergencies and take care of people around you, but you can do a lot just with influence and you know, hardiness and knowing that if I think a lot of people just haven't been in bad enough situations to know what actual bad is. To know what you can get by on. There was a time in my life as a kid, me and my brother joke about it. We're like, Do you remember that time that we just didn't have money? So we ate a microwave potato with a slice of American cheese on it every night for a week. Oh, yeah. And we were just and it was an Irish meal prep. My my mom knew what we were doing, she knew that's all we had, and it was just we were so poor. It was just eat a really good lunch at school because you're on free lunch. Yeah, and then you're gonna have potato cheese for dinner. And potato cheese, it is. I think a lot of people I wish it was as fancy as those. It was a it was a microwave. Yeah, fucking French gourmet fucking baked potatoes. Mine was a wrinkly potato made in a microwave with a slice of American cheese on it. If you were lucky, you had a wet napkin wrapped around that potato. And my thought process on everything has always been Yeah, that's more like it right there. I I I think most people have not truly suffered enough to appreciate how far, how little they can get by on, which is tragic. But at the same time, I don't want anyone to ever go through the things that I had to go through because I didn't like them. I didn't like them at the time.
SPEAKER_01:I have a question about suffrage, but while we're on that point, we literally were just talking to somebody about finding you can only find true love in suffrage. That was a quote from the men's circle. Maybe that's what it was. But yeah, I truly believe that. Like you will never find true love unless you suffer. Yeah. And it's like you can tie that to religion, you can tie it to whatever the hell you want, but real life, metaphysics, whatever, but like you will not be happy unless you suffer.
SPEAKER_02:It's one of those tropes, but you you do tend to grow the most from adversity. But I'm also as a tender heart, I don't want people to have I don't want people to not have food. I don't want people to, you know, like our minimum wage, I could probably get by paying. People for less, but to what end? Do I buy a new car? I have, you know, I buy new trinkets, I buy an Xbox. I wouldn't I would never feel good about knowing that I bought a PlayStation 5 and my cook has to walk to work because they can't afford a car or something like that. Now, if they can't afford a car and they and I also can't have something, then that's okay. But if I'm getting extras while they can't have necessities, that is where I have an inherent problem with the way the world works. Um it's I'm not gonna fix anything, but you can you can do good for the people around you, you can control what you can control. I think that's what you're doing. I don't care about anything else. Like when you know, I I tell people this all the time. I love someone who is passionate about a cause, but I hate someone who is passionate about every cause because it's all bullshit. It's smoke and mirrors.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, if you stand for everything, you stand for nothing.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and it I you know, people are sharing this and that, and I'm like, I don't care. I can I can I can help people in Evansville, I can care about this issue or that issue, and you know, I can have empathy for everything, but you can only help what you can help. And I I'm a firm believer if I can do that, I did something, and at the end of the day, it might mean nothing, but it probably means something to one person.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, those handicapped kittens in Guatemala are just gonna have to pick one and suck it at this point. Uh I wish I could, but I can't. I wanna I wanna I do want to dive into suffering. One of our questions we like to tie up each show on is um during this adventure of high school or saloon, um or the fire department, or the fire department, or the military. Uh you know, it's just a kind of general question uh about adversary adversity. But during any of your adventures, did you ever have a moment where you were like, Yeah, I've had enough. This is dumb. I'm ready to stop. I'm gonna quit this. This is stupid. Uh, why did I think, you know, like you meet that real adversary adversity for the first time. And then more importantly, in that moment, what was it that got you through to the other side? And again, that could be with the military, the fire department, or you know, high score saloon. And and how many years have you been doing high score now?
SPEAKER_02:Twelve so actually open brick and mortar, it'll be eight years, December 17th. Eight years. So in the eight years of doing high school.
SPEAKER_00:You don't have to go in depth on the moment. We care more about what pulled you through that moment. What was your motivation? What kept you going?
SPEAKER_02:I think I have I've had moments in all the things like that. You know, the military was realizing I was not an inherently good runner, which is funny because I I am now uh where I was. I I got I couldn't run and I could barely run an eight and a half minute mile to get in. And I was running my best two mile ever was back before I fucked up my knee. I could run two miles in like 1215.
SPEAKER_01:That's insane. Because 13 minutes is like a perfect score. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um that the military was just I was always really good at things the first time I tried, and I now now know that's ADHD. If I'm not good at something immediately, I don't want to do it anymore. And I suffered from that for years and years and years having to go, you're it's okay, you're not gonna be good at it. You just have to keep trying. Military was running, fire department was um a lot of the testing afterward was bullshit. I actually always loved that job. There was nothing I ended up not wanting the job anymore. It was nothing to do with the job, and it was more so about the other circumstances of my life. You wanted to have a life. Yeah, I wanted to have a life that was more about my free time and less about finances and retiring early and having shiny things. Um, high score, I still want to quit every week. Okay. It never stops. What keeps you showing up and unlocking the doors? Yeah, what keeps the lights on for you? Uh because otherwise I'd have to the same my problem with the military was I had to take orders from someone dumber than me. You like to be your own boss. I never want to be in a position where I'm standing at a supermarket and a guy who barely manages to tie his shoes is telling me I did something wrong because it's not how the book says to do it. And it's how or not how he says to it. I'm like, well, this is a better way. Well, it doesn't matter. That's not how we do it. I can never go back to that. So what always pulls me through is it's a lot of things. I really do have a lot of pride in what we've built because it was a shitty story. We got sued and barely made it. Um, we had a fire, you know, whole fire alarm thing happen, barely made it. Um COVID. Kids arcade, COVID. We've been through so much, and um now I you know, you you open up and you have a couple guys and there's this and that, and then you look around, you go, I have 14 employees, and they all rely on me for a paycheck and to keep the wheels on this thing. Um but I never feel obligated. I feel fortunate to have that. I feel, you know, if someone's working for me, they're quite literally trading their life so that I can make a little bit of money. They're making money too, but I get driplets of it. That's kind of a special thing that someone does for you. Um to trade their time so you can make money is like a parasitic um situation, honestly. I do feel like a parasite sometimes that I'm trickling a little bit of money off of every dollar that they make. Yeah. And it's off of them, which is why we do good things for our employees. We take care of them, we give Christmas bonuses, they get mental health days and things like that. But I think what always gets me through it is I just I don't know what else I would do. I've already had my dream jobs. Right. I I wanted to be a firefighter so bad. And I wanted to be in the military at a certain time. I wanted to see what that was like, and I wanted to be a teacher at one point, even too. I've kind of done everything I wanted to do, so it's I don't want to say it's this or nothing, but it's what else is there?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I I enjoy this. I think the cool part about high score saloon is not only like you bring this nostalgia to like you know the millennial age group of people, but then like we can also take our kids in there, and our kids get to experience like games of the past, which is like pretty cool.
SPEAKER_02:And that's why player two is so like high score is what it is, but player two we have everything from like new Nintendo Switches and like the latest dance games from Japan all the way to Miss Pac-Man and that's so we've had grandpas, dads, and sons come in three generations and all have something to do. And I'm like, that's what I wanted for this. It's like it again, it's easy whenever you're running two things that are so similar but so different, it's such a different experience for people.
SPEAKER_01:Hell yeah, brother. As we're wrapping up here, though, we're we're gonna put a bow on this thing. But before we do, do you have uh any dates or any like thank yous or shout-outs you want to give as we're uh tying up here and um putting a bow on this thing?
SPEAKER_02:We will get a venue open by summertime, I hope. And that's the upstairs? Yeah, that's really the only date that I have, and you know, I think above everyone else, I love our customers, they're wonderful. But I always think our employees before above last-minute shout-outs.
SPEAKER_00:Who's got you to where you're at?
SPEAKER_02:Who's keeping you going? Always the employees. It's always them. They're they're running the show so that I can, you know, they actually are back there pushing the drawer and making drinks so that I can stand up here and pull strings. So it's always to the employees, they do everything for us.
SPEAKER_01:And you do a lot for them, brother. Uh, so it does, I'm sure if I would be proud to work for you, and I'm sure all 14 of them are proud to work for you. You do great things for the organization, for the community, and for them. Um, it sounds like you got you got a good head on your shoulders, you got an amazing uh foundation built here with high score saloon. I look forward to see what you're doing in the future, hopefully opening a new spot upstairs uh this summer. So very excited for you, brother.
SPEAKER_00:Um I don't I'm you could have done anything with your Sunday, and you came in and we got to learn a bit about you, a bit about high score, and we can't thank you enough, Clinton.
SPEAKER_02:I'll make Jared come in sometime and talk about the actual thing. Oh yeah, get Jared's ass in here.
SPEAKER_00:I want to be scared. Maybe he can bring one. No.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah, dude. We just played Ms. Packet. He would bring his 3D printer. Uh but seriously, dude, thank you so much. Uh thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you to the listeners, to the viewers. Like, subscribe, share the thing, do what you gotta do. Um, but this has been another thrilling episode of the Days Grimm. And my name is Brian Michael Day. My name is Thomas Grimm. And this has been Clint from High Schools Malone. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you guys.
SPEAKER_04:BBL trip BBL BBL BB BB Liver, I'm gonna listen to no longer.